Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (foreground) and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant hold a press conference at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, December 16, 2023. (Noam Revkin Fenton/Flash90)
Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig: Bibi’s Offensive Against Defense (Ministers)
Here’s a not so trivial trivia question: What do these four Israeli politicians – Yitzhak Mordechai, Moshe Yaalon, Avigdor Lieberman, Yoav Gallant – uniquely share in common? True, they all served as Defense Ministers (DMs) from 1999-2024, but so did some others. The answer relates to an unusual common denominator: all were fired (or resigned under duress/protest) from their Defense Ministry position by Prime Minister Netanyahu. I don’t think the Guinness Book of World Records keeps a list of resigning Defense MInisters but surely this is a world record. What does such recurring behavior say about PM Bibi? A lot – but first some background regarding each case.
PM Netanyahu fired DM Yitzhak Mordechai in 1999; the latter accused him of numerous lies and “endangering everything for his own political needs.” In the subsequent election debate between the two, Mordechai demanded of Bibi to “look me in the eyes” – which the PM was unable to do. Netanyahu lost that election to Ehud Barak.
In 2016, DM Yaalon resigned because he discovered that behind his back Bibi had promised Avigdor Lieberman (Bibi’s former Chief of Staff) to replace him, a politician without any significant national security experience. Why did the PM want Yaalon out? Because he had defended the army and especially Vice Chief of Staff Yair Golan who warned that certain extremist right-wing elements in the West Bank (who were indiscriminately attacking Palestinians) were doing things that resembled what the Nazis had done to the Jews.
Getting rid of Yaalon, though, backfired on the PM: within two years DM Lieberman also resigned, accusing Netanyahu of “giving in to [Hamas] terror… by buying quiet for the short term at the expense of national security over the long term.” The issue? Enabling Qatar to send fuel and money to Hamas without restraint – this after the prior decade during which the Israeli security authorities worked tirelessly to stop such under-the-table financing. As we know from Oct. 7, the “short term quiet” ended with a huge bang – precisely as Lieberman warned in his resignation letter to the PM.
The reason for the PM’s “strange” policy? By keeping Hamas afloat, he was able to continue claiming that Israel had “no partner” for any peace negotiations. Indeed, Hamas on life support also served as a counterwight to the PLA (Fatah-led) government in the West Bank, thereby ensuring that it too could not speak for all Palestinians – all this while Israel’s own national security agencies (especially the SHABAK and the IDF) continued their close security coordination with the PLA! Bibi was “playing both sides of the coin” with a vengenace.
More than anything else, this catastrophically failed policy is the main future danger to Bibi’s continued rule. It is now clear to all concerned that his directive to enable funding of Hamas led directly to last year’s disaster – something that a future National Commission of Inquiry will lay out fully for public consumption. Unless…
There’s a problematic clause in the Basic Law regarding the establishment of such a Commission of Inquiry. Although the President of the Supreme Court decides on the other two members of the Commission – thus ensuring objective non-partisanship – it is the government itself that sets the contours for the investigation. Put simply, the present government could decide that the Commission will investigate the immediate, tactical mistakes prior to Oct. 7 (i.e., problems regarding the IDF’s lack of preparedness and very slow response), and not the earlier, strategic policy errors that enabled such an attack in the first place.
But PM Netanyahu doesn’t want to chance any estavlishment of such a commission. To that end, he’s trying to keep the war continuing endlessly, thus claiming that Israel cannot afford the confusion of a Commission of Inquiry while the war is ongoing. He has declared that only “total victory” will end the war in Gaza – but already several months ago the army removed most of its units from there, so that “total victory” will take a lot longer to attain (if ever).
Former DM Gallant called Bibi’s bluff, stating unequivocally that the IDF has little more to do or to attain in Gaza, and that the time has come to end that war and return all the hostages. For Bibi, that’s tantamount to political suicide with an Inquiry Commission being set up immediately thereafter. His solution as in the past: fire the DM who was basically crying out loud “The Emperor Has No (Policy) Clothes.”
Beyond all this, it is worth noting that Netanyahu has not only been a political executioner of Defense Ministers. The number of other high level ministers from his own Likud party who have left Bibi’s government over the years probably deserves its own Guinness record: Ariel Sharon, Dan Meridor, Tzipi Livni, Benny Begin (former PM Menachem Begin’s son!), Gideon Saar and numerous others. In many such cases, for a similar reason: they were too popular (a threat to his leadership position) or wouldn’t toe every policy line that Bibi pushed (a threat to his authority).
During his failed election campaign in 1999, Netanyahu used the following (now infamous) slogan: “They are Afraid!” (Heym Me’fakhadim). Based on the past quarter century of his ongoing political executions, it’s clear that “it takes one to know one”…
